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The organic metaphor demystified: rhetoric of environmental change and environmental preservation in contemporary American nature writing

THE ORGANIC METAPHOR DEMYSTIFIED:
RHETORIC OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
AND ENVIRONMENTAL PRESERVATION
IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NATURE WRITING
by
Shiuh-huah Serena Chou
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)
May 2007
Copyright 2007 Shiuh-huah Serena Chou

The Organic Metaphor Demystified: Rhetoric of Environmental Change and Environmental Preservation in Contemporary American Nature Writing examines the common experience and the symbolic associations of the organic in American nature writing, focusing in particular on the intersection between the politics of cultural/environmental preservation and the organic -- a vital concept in the contemporary organic movement, deep ecological ethics, the science of ecology, and indigenous cosmology. As a discourse that carries specific imagery and meaning with regard to the idea of nature as a living organism that contains in itself an intrinsic order, the organic and its holistic implications have lent their critical force to environmentalism in its critique of the capitalist and technological transgressions of the mechanistic paradigm. Contextualizing David Mas Masumoto within the traditions of pastoralism and agrarianism, this thesis first reveals the ambivalence of the organic as a narrative strategy that is capable of "preserving" the stability of nature and the authenticity of minority cultural tradition against socio-economic transformations, and yet in its continuous attempt to impose on what seems to be a complex, dynamic "nature" a moral/ideological/structural order, reconfigures a static image of nature. My reading of Rachel Carson then shows how her (re-)situating of the human subject and the toxicology in the organic circle, in a food chain where humans are reduced to a biological collectivity, in fact bespeaks a landscape of liminality, where nature and culture intersect and interact, and a middle passage bridges ecocentric and anthropocentric ethics. Building on Carson's revision of the organic cosmology, Barry Lopez's investigation of the organic as place made visible through the process of interacting with the spatial invites the study of the preservation of nature and aboriginality in the context of cultural geography as a pastiche.; Together these works manifest in their respective ways a politics and aesthetics of preservation that celebrates the organic as a measure of cultural hybridity and environmental diversity.

THE ORGANIC METAPHOR DEMYSTIFIED:
RHETORIC OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
AND ENVIRONMENTAL PRESERVATION
IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NATURE WRITING
by
Shiuh-huah Serena Chou
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)
May 2007
Copyright 2007 Shiuh-huah Serena Chou